Less than a day after Sony teases a reveal of the PS4, CD Projekt Red—makers of the popular Witcher series—have unveiled the engine that will be powering their next-generation games. The timing of the announcement is probably a coincidence, but maybe not!

Called RedEngine 3, the tech will be powering the company's upcoming Cyberpunk 2077. It will likely also be the engine for the project the dev studio has promised to spill the beans about on Feb. 5, which many expect to be the next Witcher game. Here's the official word about the new tech from CD Projekt Red:

Details have been scarce on Cyberpunk 2077 since the adaptation of the cult pen-and-paper RPG was…
Read more Read more

"The REDengine 3 tech is tailor-made to create non-linear and story-driven RPGs with a system that allows to stream and handle fully explorable open-worlds. Cyberpunk 2077, the second project the studio is working on, will have prime examples demonstrating that REDengine 3 is the perfect tool for creating immense universes filled with exciting, nonlinear adventures. The advanced technology of the REDengine 3 makes RPGs comparable to top-shelf shooters, both in terms of game-world presentation and the epic proportions of events that the player is drawn into. The engine is a next-gen-ready solution that begins to blur the line between pre-rendered CGI movies and real time rendered graphics, bringing us closer to the most life-like world ever created in video games. All the state-of-the-art visuals form a living ecosystem allowing the player to be a part of a vivid environment. The new face and body-animation systems implemented in REDengine 3 offer realistic expression of emotions, movie-quality scenes and character interactions.

The technology uses high-dynamic-range rendering with 64-bit precision that ensures superior picture quality with more realistic and precise lighting without losses derived from reduced contrast ratio. A flexible renderer prepared for deferred or forward+ rendering pipelines has a wide array of cinematic post-processing effects, including bokeh depth-of-field, color grading and flares from many lights. A high-performance terrain system allows multiple material layers to be efficiently blended and uses tessellation for the best possible detail. The technology also includes seamless blending between animations and physics along with many more features. The engine uses CD Projekt RED's new version of its proprietary REDkit editor with tools made specifically for RPG game creation. The editor can build complex, branching quests and set them in a free roaming environment with a simplicity not achieved by similar toolsets.